A Navy SEAL Becomes More Inspiring in His After Life

Jon Tumilson accomplished a lot in life.

Like so much else about the late Chief Petty Officer Jon Tumilson, his running seemed at once humble and epic, gritty and glamorous, transparent and mysterious. He practiced the sport in a disciplined, measured fashion, and yet when he ran, he often seemed larger than life. These disparate, at times paradoxical, qualities showed most clearly when JT, as he was known to his Navy SEAL brethren, visited his hometown of Rockford, Iowa.

"A few years back, it was a hot summer day, over 90 degrees, and I was working here in my shop," recalls Mark Biggs, an auto mechanic in Rockford. "I wave hello to Jon as he heads out for his run, then go about my business. Two hours later I'm driving over to Charles City, 14 miles away, to pick up a part. I see this guy running along the shoulder of the highway. I get closer and I realize it's Jon. There he is! I couldn't believe it. He was still running. Now Jon was a big guy, six-five, 220 pounds. The sweat was bucketing off of him, his face was all red, he looked like hell, but he was flying along. 'You need a ride?' I hollered to him. 'Hell no!' he yelled back at me. He must've run more than 20 miles that day."

A few years earlier, on a warm late-spring afternoon, Tyler Dingel was just starting what would be a taxing practice with the baseball team at Rockford High School. He looked up from a drill and saw a lone figure toiling around the school track. A half-hour later Dingel looked up again; the man was still running. Dingel realized it was Tumilson.

"About two hours later," Dingel says today, "when baseball practice was finished, JT was still grinding laps around that track."

Along with daunting levels of endurance and brawn, JT possessed the looks of a leading man and an ingenuous, infectious charm. He was dark-haired and hazel-eyed, with a square-jawed smile and a gentle manner, his clublike arms covered with arabesque tattoos; years earlier, as a young sailor stationed in Hawaii, he had posed shirtless for a beefcake "Men of the Islands" calendar. When he was home on leave and running past the high school, the girls would sometimes steal glances out the window to admire him.

Kathy Tumilson, JT's mother, a 67-year-old retired registered nurse, smiles at these stories and recollections. She explains that her only son, based in Virginia and deployed overseas for months at a time, returned to Iowa often. "Jon lived for his family at home and his SEAL family around the world," Kathy says, while driving through Rockford, a farm and quarry town of 900 people sitting at the confluence of the Shell Rock and Winnebago rivers in northeast Iowa. It's a glimmering August afternoon one year after JT's last arrival in town–when his remains were shipped home from Afghanistan for burial.

"Sometimes he would surprise me," Kathy says, "like the time he jumped out of a box on Christmas Eve." Other times, she adds, JT would just show up, driving from his postings in California or Virginia in his Chevy Silverado, his beloved Labrador, Hawkeye, riding beside him.

Kathy turns left at the edge of town, crossing a bridge over the Winnebago, flowing low in this corn- and soybean-withering summer of record drought. "This was one of Jon's favorite routes," she says suddenly. "You'd see him running out here, all alone. No one else in town could have kept up with him. No one else tried."

Kathy brightens, as if she half-expects to see her son moving toward her in the distance. "I asked him once if he ran to let off steam and clear his mind, given all he must see on deployment. Jon told me, 'No, Mom, I don't run to let off steam. I let off steam when I go to work.'"

She turns into the Riverside Cemetery on the edge of town, parks, and purposefully walks to her son's grave. "I come here every other day to tend the flowers and straighten up," she says. "People leave things. People drive hundreds of miles out of their way to visit Jon."

Today there's a shot glass, a handwritten note, and a few fading flowers. Similar shrines to JT exist in Virginia Beach, where JT was based at the time of his death, and in San Diego, his longtime previous posting, where he was a fixture of the local running community.

Jon Tumilson died on August 6, 2011, when he was on a mission in Afghanistan. The 35-year-old was one of 30 U.S. military service members killed when an American helicopter was shot down by enemy fire. Like JT, several of the 17 Navy SEALs killed in the attack were members of the unit's famed Team 6. (Three months earlier Team 6 had led the assault on Osama bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan; according to the Navy, none of the men killed in the helicopter crash, including JT, had directly participated in the bin Laden raid.) It was the single worst loss of American lives in the Afghanistan conflict, and the single deadliest day in the history of U.S. Special Operations Command.

"Jon's funeral was one year ago today," Kathy says, as she manicures the area around his grave site. She picks out the dead flowers and shakes dust out of the shot glass. She makes sure the line on the stone proclaiming JT's Bronze Star is clearly visible. "That week still doesn't seem quite real to me, but at the same time it was the most vivid, intense time of my life, and the life of the whole town. It was like we had never fully known who Jon was until he was gone."

She looks down at the stone. "Once Jon got to be a SEAL, and became a serious runner, he would give me a hard time about the way I cooked. 'Mom, why are you messing up that perfectly good broccoli by dumping melted cheese all over it?' But since he's been gone, we've started to educate ourselves. There are people here in Rockford living with a greater sense of purpose. There are people who have become runners, who have learned why it was so important for Jon to be out there on the road on days when it was 90 degrees or 10 below zero."

Kathy explains that, like most SEALs, her son shunned the limelight. She speculates that JT would be appalled by the attention that has come his way since his death. "But I think he would have been proud that people are running and living healthier lives because of him," Kathy says. "That might seem like a small thing, compared to all that he sacrificed for, but Jon wouldn't think it was small."

Clay Barnes felt inexplicably light-headed, not quite himself, which was odd because Barnes almost never got sick. Nor did he often complain; bitching, a time-honored tradition in the regular U.S. military, was anathema among the U.S. Navy SEALs. On the evening of Friday, August 5, 2011, Barnes (which is not his real name; the Navy SEAL requested anonymity and asked not to be photographed for this story because of his on-going military duties) was at home in Virginia Beach with his wife and their 6-month-old daughter, in a training cycle before his fifth deployment to the Middle East. He chalked up the feeling to a mild case of dehydration.

Working out in the August humidity in the Tidewater region of Virginia–hitting the gym and training grounds–could suck the fluids out of any man. Barnes had been stationed in Virginia Beach for three years now and was still getting used to it. A native Arizonan, he felt more at home in the West. His previous posting at Naval Base Coronado near San Diego had been just about perfect–surfing, mountains, gentle Pacific breezes. It had been his friend JT's idea to move on, to try to join the fabled Team 6, the elite of the elite, which was based at the sprawling Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach.

"I tried to talk him out of it," Barnes says. "I argued about how good we had it in Coronado, but JT was determined to make Team 6. He wanted to serve with the best. JT was the most easygoing guy imaginable. But once he set a goal, there was no stopping him."

Barnes had accompanied JT through the arduous winnowing process for Team 6–a withering six-month regimen that taxed a candidate's mental and emotional reserves as much as standard SEAL training tested physical strength and endurance (SEAL is an acronym for sea, air, and land teams). Final acceptance was in part based on the subjective approval of present Team 6 members, who measured a man's reputation and combat experience alongside his military skills. Typically, more than half of Team 6 aspirants washed out during the process; JT and Barnes made it through, joining the SEAL team in the fall of 2010, just a few months before other members of that team took out Osama bin Laden.

He and JT had deployed together to Baghdad in 2004 and had been virtually inseparable since. The two men were more than friends, maybe more than brothers. Barnes was just a year younger than JT. They were the same size–6'5", around 220–and emanated the same rawboned strength. They lived by the same code of honor and possessed the same combination of humility and self-confidence that characterized a SEAL. They had both served years in the regular Navy before joining the team. But they also had their differences. JT wanted to be a SEAL from the time he was 15; Barnes joined the Navy on a lark after high school and decided to become a SEAL because he thought it looked cool. Although he was a fierce natural fighter, JT was invariably sweet-tempered and had a kind word for everybody; Barnes carried more of an edge. JT, who grew up around hunting and firearms in Iowa, qualified as a sniper specialist for the teams; Barnes lacked the stealth and patience required for sniper classification and specialized as a breacher, leading forced entry into buildings. JT was a runner; Barnes, although he kept in supremely good shape, saw scant appeal in running for its own sake.

From that first deployment in Baghdad in '04, the two men were part of a brotherhood within a brotherhood that included SEAL operatives Boe Nankivel, and Marcus and Morgan Luttrell, twin brothers from Texas. Marcus had attained fame for his heroism during Operation Red Wings in Afghanistan in 2005, during which he held out for days under insurgent fire after three of his teammates were killed. (Marcus's best-selling memoir, Lone Survivor, described the episode.) All the guys were close, but Barnes and JT shared a special bond. They were so tight that you looked for the other man when one turned the corner; so tight that before Barnes got married, he and JT staged a semi-mock divorce ceremony, with an actual justice of the peace "presiding." During most of their time with the SEALs, through multiple deployments in the Middle East (for his bravery in a 2006 firefight in Iraq, JT had been awarded the Bronze Star with Valor), JT and Barnes had fought side by side.

In the early summer of 2011, however, the two men had been reassigned to separate teams. A few weeks earlier JT had posted to Afghanistan with a new team, while Barnes continued training in Virginia for a later deployment. Barnes had heard that JT's mission was going well, that he was meshing with his new teammates. No surprise there; JT could get along with anybody. Like any organization, the SEALs had groups and cliques; JT was the one operative whom everybody liked and respected.

"He was the glue among groups, the invaluable common denominator," Barnes says of JT. "He was a first-rate fighter. Just as important, he made his teammates better fighters. He was the guy you wanted around in a pinch, and also the guy you wanted to pound beers with at a sports bar, or talk to around a campfire about the meaning of life." Just the week before his death, JT had e-mailed his parents that he loved this group and deployment. He said that he and the guys were doing a world of good. All of which made the developments of August 6 that much more tragic to accept.